[swift-evolution] The great renaming and the state of new Unified Logging in Swift

[Goffredo Marocchi]

Sent from my iPhone

On 6 Sep 2016, at 02:44, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com> wrote:

>> On Sep 5, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Goffredo Marocchi via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> I hope you will not find it too impolite, but this feels like a more dogmatic decision than I would like. I agree that macro's do not feel pure, but they allow you to adapt to some of the ugliness of real world use cases (the fact that Swift forces people to write a lot of boilerplate or to give up on this pushes people that support iOS9 and want to go full Swift to drop the idea of using os_log... do we rather have that than compromise slightly on purity perhaps?). Sorry for the long aside, but maybe shedding all the C part of Objective-C did hurt a bit the ease of adaptation. 
> 
> I think you may be misinterpreting the reason macros are being deferred. As I understand it, it's not because of dislike for macros, but because of a desire to do them deeply and comprehensively—something more like Lisp's treatment of macros than C's. It's the same reason we haven't yet done regular expressions, or concurrency, or any of a hundred other features that are easy to do poorly and difficult to do well.
> 
> A secondary reason is that we want time to develop easier-to-use features for common boilerplate cases before we design a boilerplate feature that can do anything, but is difficult to use. For instance, the use cases for the proposed property behavior feature could probably be handled with macros, but it would be much more difficult to define a macro than it would be to define a property behavior.
> 

Fair enough, I can understand and appreciate the desire to do those features well, but there is also the desire to use such features now that keeps me still writing more and more Objective-C at work. iOS 6 and iOS 7 still matter too much to where I work for iOS 6 to be dropped and without Objective-C's ability to swizzle methods we would have been in trouble with several vendors pushing of libraries which would crash if their code ran on an iOS 6 device, but that is an aside.

> -- 
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
> 
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